Chapter 2 - Understanding ALUI Portal With Helloworld, (Aqualogic Developer's Notebook)

Part II – Portlet Development
When you are standing on the top of Sears Tower, you have a pretty good view of the entire city
of Chicago. To take a snapshot of a city’s section, you need to use a camera with good zoom in
capability.
This similar analogy can be applied to a portlet. A portlet gives you a snapshot view of an
application. It can be rendered in a small container window within the portal user interface.
G6 portal makes it really easy to develop portlets. For many development projects, the IDK1
should be used. It is a set of libraries allowing a portlet application to leverage many of portal’s
built-in functions, such as session management, persistence, and dynamic HTML controls.
We will begin by writing the HelloWorld Portlet.
1
AquaLogic User Interaction Development Kit (IDK), forrmerly called Enterprise Development Kit (EDK), and
other developer libraries can downloaded from BEA’s dev2dev website at
http://edocs.bea.com/alui/devdoc/docs60/index.html#References/API_Libraries/index.htm
1
Chapter 1 - HelloWorld Portlet
In our first example, we will write the HelloWorld portlet. Then, we will add dynamic contents to
that portlet and show time and user’s IP address.
1 Setup
In the G6 portal, portlets are remote objects that get processed by the portal gateway. Portlets are
web services objects and require you to register a remote server in the portal. (That is why EDK
prefixes are either com.plumtree.remote or Plumtree.Remote.)
1.1 For Java developer

(Create Java project)
We will use the Tomcat application server in the NetBeans 5 IDE.
1. Select the <File> menu, and choose <New Project>. The following dialog box will
display on your screen.
2. Select <Web Application>, and click next button.
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3. Type in the project name <helloworld> and choose an appropriate directory to save the
project. (I am using c:\My Documents\g6_book\java_src directory to hold all my java
projects related to this guide.) Click Finish to create this project. (We are not using JSF or
Struts. The next window can be ignored.)
4. Right click on the <helloworld> node and choose new JSP page.
5. Type in <helloworld> for the JSP File Name. (The existing index.jsp can safely deleted.)
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6. Replace the page content with following content.
<%@page contentType="text/html"%>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=UTF-8">
<title>Hello World Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HelloWorld Page</h1>
</body>
</html>
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7. Launch your application by right click on the <helloworld.jsp> file and choose <Run
File>.
8. Depending on how you configured the NetBeans IDE, either IE or Mozilla Firefox
browser will launch. In the address bar, you will find <
http://localhost:8084/helloworld/helloworld.jsp >. This tells you on which port number
your Tomcat app server is running.
5
9. Alternatively, you can find your Tomcat’s port number by clicking on the NetBeans’
Runtimes tab and then right click on the Bundled Tomcat’s properties.
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1.2 For .NET developer
We will use IIS application server.
1. We will first create a folder to hold all our project files. (I am using the C:\My
Documents\g6_book\asp_src directory.) Note: It is crucial to give you IIS account
(ASP.NET user) appropriate permissions. You can right click on the folder and choose
security tab to set it. Without that, your IIS may not work and gives you security errors.
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2. Create a new virtual directory with the IIS manager. Give it a descriptive name. The
direct URL to access our applications will become http://localhost/<applicationname>
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3. Next, we launch Microsoft Visual Studio .NET IDE. Click <File> … <New Project>.
4. Choose ASP.NET Web Application and set the location to store files, e.g.
http://localhost/helloworld
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5. Right click on the project, and choose <Add Web Form>. This creates the ASPX page
and the C# code behind file.
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6. Change the page layout of the <helloworld.aspx> file to FlowLayout.
7. Replace the HTML content of the page with the following.

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="helloworld.aspx.cs"
AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="helloworld.helloworld" %>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>helloworld</title>
</HEAD>
<body>
HelloWorld ASPX page
</body>
</HTML>
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8. Build the project by pressing Control + Shift + B keys together. And, browse to the web
page.
1.3 Show web page as a portlet

Next, we will display the helloworld.jsp page as a portlet inside the G6 portal. To do this, we
need to set up a remote server and a web service representing the <helloworld.jsp> page.
1. Log into the portal as the “Administrator”, click on the <Administration> tab. And, create
an <Administrator Folder> to hold your objects, e.g. remote server, web services, portlet.
You can name this folder as <myJavaProject> or <myASPProject>.
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2. Inside this folder, create a remote server for your projects.
3. The remote server’s base URL and port number should match your Tomcat or IIS
settings. (I prefer separately appending my project’s name to the end of the remote
server’s base URL. That allows me to reuse a remote server object for multiple projects.)
Give the remote serve a clear and concise name, e.g. <My Java Remote Server> or <My
ASP Remote Server> and save it.
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4. Now create a web service for your <helloworld.jsp> or <helloworld.aspx> page.
a. On the Main Setting page, you can select your Remote Server <My Java Remote
Server> or <My ASP Remote Server> and URL to call your <helloworld.jsp> or
<helloworld.aspx> page. As a developer, you may want to debug and step through
you application. For that convenience reason, it is suggested to set both Portlet
and Gateway Timeouts to long time. In my example, both timeouts are set to 20
minutes.
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b. On the HTTP Configuration page, set minimum and maximum cache time to 0
seconds and deselect the “Suppress errors where possible (show cached content
instead)” checkbox.
As a developer, you want your portlet to reflect your application’s latest state.
However, in the production environment, you will want your portlet to be cached
for performance reason.
Click on the <Add Gateway Prefix> link and enter “.” in the textbox.
You can gateway contents on your remote server by:
- A specific file
http://<remoteserver>/helloworld/portlet.jsp
- A directory and everything below it
http://<remoteserver>/helloworld/.
- The entire remote server
http://<remoteserver>/helloworld/
Note:
• Gateway URLs are case sensitive
• Special case - If you want to specify an URL that is not relative to
the current remote server, just enter the complete URL in the Web
Service editor
http://<remoteserver>/helloworld/http://myotherserver:9000/app
• If you are using IIS as your application server, make sure you had
given appropriate permissions to your ASP.NET user.
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5. Create a new portlet from your web service.
• Both “Narrow” and “Wide” type portlets can be placed on the regular
pages.
• “Header” and “Footer” type portlet can be useful for pluggable navigation
and is used through the portal’s “experience definition”.
• “Content Canvas” type portlet can be used to display a company’s or a
community’s custom logo.
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6. Add the portlet to a page.
1.4 Add dynamic content

1.4.1 Add time stamp & show browser’s IP address
Our next step is to add some dynamic contents on the portlet page. We will start by showing the
server’s current time when this page was loaded. We also want to show browser’s IP address.
Java:
Modify the helloworld.jsp page.
7. <%@page contentType="text/html"%>
8. <html>
9. <head>
10.<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
11.<title>Hello World Page</title>
12.</head>
13.<body>
14.HelloWorld.jsp Page <br/>
15.<%="The Current time is: " + new java.util.Date()%>
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16.<br>
17.<%
18.out.print( "Browser's IP address is " + request.getRemoteAddr() );
19.%>
20.</body>
21.</html>
ASP
Modify the helloworld.aspx page.
22. <%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="helloworld.aspx.cs"
AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="helloworld.helloworld"
trace="false" %>
23.<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >
24.<HTML>
25.<HEAD>
26.<title>helloworld</title>
27.</HEAD>
28.<body>
29.HelloWorld ASPX page<br>
30.<%
31.Response.Write ("The current time is: " + DateTime.Now.ToString());
32.%>
33.<br>
34.<%
35.Response.Write("Browser's IP address is: " +
Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"]);
36.%>
37.</body>
38.</HTML>
Optionally, the trace option can be set to true or false, to aid debugging the ASP page.
1.5 Bonus Questions

• How do you pass parameters to a portlet?
• How do you set cookie with either a JSP or ASPX file?
• How do you keep persistent data across several pages?
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Part II – Portlet Development

We will begin by writing the HelloWorld Portlet.

1.1 For Java developer

2. Select <Web Application>, and click next button.

7. Replace the HTML content of the page with the following.

1.3 Show web page as a portlet

1.4 Add dynamic content

1.5 Bonus Questions

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